Are you really not aware of the AI companies buying up literally entire years worth of upcoming manufacturing capability to fuel their data center needs? It's been wreaking havoc all across the IT space for a while now. It started with RAM and GPUs but it's expanded to storage and I believe even CPUs are spiking as well now, but don't quote me on that. Just bubble levels of demand for hardware across the board and it's really revealed the fragility of the industry's ability to supply hardware given how few manufacturers for the actual chipsets there actually are and just how costly (both in time, money and specialized knowledge) it is to actually build out more production capability.
Shit's wild out there when companies use the fake and gayness of the stock market to finance infinite hardware purchases and the real world can't crank out enough hardware to meet that absurd demand. Consumer grade products aren't even part of the equation anymore. Crucial, which used to be my go-to brand for SSDs and sometimes RAM was outright gutted because its parent company ran the math and decided that there was zero reason to continue serving the retail customer when there was orders of magnitude more money to be made focusing solely on components for data centers.
It may be possible (the main causes of aging have been well identified), though I doubt any amount of LLMs or related tech will get them there. IMO, that's just hubris. It going to take genius type engineers and doctors, and time.
In the meantime while I wait for prices to drop I am organising and optimising all my storage libraries for easy backing up/expansion when I can buy for cheap
HDDs and SSDs very likely. They can swap from SAS to SATA on a dime, and many of us can use used SAS drives. NAND for server SSDs are just binned and respec'd consumer NAND, and many people will have good uses for server SSDs at home and work.
RAM is a big question mark. Part of the RAM problem is that they are shifting types of RAM produced. Less normal DDR5, and more LPDDR5 types and HBM (HBM is physically huge, and low yield, and low power DDR5 is only soldered into main boards). If it takes into next year to burst the bubble, there will be production competition from DDR6, as well.
I'm aware of people talking about AI huge buying leading to increased prices. I just didn't know or wasn't sure how much is opportunistic price raising that doesn't reflect reality. Like how fast food used "covid" to justify sit down restaurant prices for what is supposed to be 5 dollar meals. I never believed the economic justification from fast food.
I don't follow closely enough or are aware of all the ins and outs to know if the AI was the reason to hike prices or the excuse to hike prices, or if it's a mix of both.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's a non-zero amount of "oh hey this is a good opportunity to jack up the price and blame it on data centers", but the disrupted market is real. It's a large part of why Trump make a big government investment in Intel in my estimation. The inability to supply our own chips domestically represented a national security threat that got revealed by the AI demand spike.
Yeah, I fed this conversation into AI and it's indeed bleak. I wanted to get a new mega HDD like 20 Tb to store full libraries of games, including PS3 before the internet archive gets inevitably shut down in our draconian times. 22 TB 1 year ago was like 200 something dollars.
Now it's 550 dollars. I have the pressure of wanting to wait until the price is lower, but also concerned if I wait too long, the ability to download huge libraries like PS3 will become shut down. We're so close to being like North Korea with internet. Very little is standing in the way of that, so I wanted an archive of roms before the inevitable happens.
Price hikes and drops are generally the best economic signals that exist because they are completely public and they depend on people's real buying decisions. Regardless of the motives involved, if companies charge more and people continue to pay it, the market will be flooded with supply until a new equilibrium is reached, because there's money to be made. Gas prices shoot up in disaster areas, then return to normalcy as supply increases.
I'm aware that this assumes a free market, which we don't have in several respects, but it does hold generally true. For example, publishers initially tried to hold the line at high prices for ebooks, but the market has kept things relatively reasonable.
Flash makers are limited by water supply, and most modern memory and logic products are operating as zero sum markets, right now. Growth exists, but it can be sped up to meet demand, not by a long shot. Micron also went all in on AI product production, and Hynix is heavily leaning into it.
The big HDD makers all seem to have some institutional history and wisdom. Tbey are selling like crazy, but not changing any major plans. WD and Seagate are very much acting like this is a bubble (it is), and will pass. They are selling out into the future, but not doing anything that would put them in higher risk if it were to crash next week. Good for their profits and company health, but ad for our wallets.
Unfortunately, I know people on the inside, and the bubble is not gonna pop anytime soon.
1.8T OpenAI IPO (for a company that spends up tto $14,000 for every $200 it gets) 1.1T Anthropic IPO are the figures I've been hearing. For a typical programmer now, the cost is split as follow:
$150,000 salary/etc
$600,000 AI tokens (low figure).
I can tell you for a fact they are right now working on the chips that will be used to power AI FIVE years from now, and already starting to take orders for them, and those chips require even MORE ram/etc. Including memory that apparently doesn't even exist yet (at least at scale).
Yeah, I kind of suspected that this wasn't going to pop anytime soon. It's a wild new technology that's very disruptive and has potential for real use beyond just the hype train. It's akin to the internet though. We'll eventually see the dust settle and AI will be an integral new part of the world but there will be hollowed out slag heaps of AI companies littering the roadway by the end of it all. How's America Online doing these days?
Are you really not aware of the AI companies buying up literally entire years worth of upcoming manufacturing capability to fuel their data center needs? It's been wreaking havoc all across the IT space for a while now. It started with RAM and GPUs but it's expanded to storage and I believe even CPUs are spiking as well now, but don't quote me on that. Just bubble levels of demand for hardware across the board and it's really revealed the fragility of the industry's ability to supply hardware given how few manufacturers for the actual chipsets there actually are and just how costly (both in time, money and specialized knowledge) it is to actually build out more production capability.
Shit's wild out there when companies use the fake and gayness of the stock market to finance infinite hardware purchases and the real world can't crank out enough hardware to meet that absurd demand. Consumer grade products aren't even part of the equation anymore. Crucial, which used to be my go-to brand for SSDs and sometimes RAM was outright gutted because its parent company ran the math and decided that there was zero reason to continue serving the retail customer when there was orders of magnitude more money to be made focusing solely on components for data centers.
Wait a year, when the AI bubble bursts, and you can get RAM and SSDs for pennies on the dollar.
I hope you're right
Me too but lets face it.
if the elite think they can gain the secrets of immortality they would drain every drop of water on this fucking planet to cool the datacenters
It may be possible (the main causes of aging have been well identified), though I doubt any amount of LLMs or related tech will get them there. IMO, that's just hubris. It going to take genius type engineers and doctors, and time.
In the meantime while I wait for prices to drop I am organising and optimising all my storage libraries for easy backing up/expansion when I can buy for cheap
HDDs and SSDs very likely. They can swap from SAS to SATA on a dime, and many of us can use used SAS drives. NAND for server SSDs are just binned and respec'd consumer NAND, and many people will have good uses for server SSDs at home and work.
RAM is a big question mark. Part of the RAM problem is that they are shifting types of RAM produced. Less normal DDR5, and more LPDDR5 types and HBM (HBM is physically huge, and low yield, and low power DDR5 is only soldered into main boards). If it takes into next year to burst the bubble, there will be production competition from DDR6, as well.
I'm aware of people talking about AI huge buying leading to increased prices. I just didn't know or wasn't sure how much is opportunistic price raising that doesn't reflect reality. Like how fast food used "covid" to justify sit down restaurant prices for what is supposed to be 5 dollar meals. I never believed the economic justification from fast food.
I don't follow closely enough or are aware of all the ins and outs to know if the AI was the reason to hike prices or the excuse to hike prices, or if it's a mix of both.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn there's a non-zero amount of "oh hey this is a good opportunity to jack up the price and blame it on data centers", but the disrupted market is real. It's a large part of why Trump make a big government investment in Intel in my estimation. The inability to supply our own chips domestically represented a national security threat that got revealed by the AI demand spike.
Yeah, I fed this conversation into AI and it's indeed bleak. I wanted to get a new mega HDD like 20 Tb to store full libraries of games, including PS3 before the internet archive gets inevitably shut down in our draconian times. 22 TB 1 year ago was like 200 something dollars.
Now it's 550 dollars. I have the pressure of wanting to wait until the price is lower, but also concerned if I wait too long, the ability to download huge libraries like PS3 will become shut down. We're so close to being like North Korea with internet. Very little is standing in the way of that, so I wanted an archive of roms before the inevitable happens.
What kind of drives are you using to make it to 22TB of storage for only $550?
Price hikes and drops are generally the best economic signals that exist because they are completely public and they depend on people's real buying decisions. Regardless of the motives involved, if companies charge more and people continue to pay it, the market will be flooded with supply until a new equilibrium is reached, because there's money to be made. Gas prices shoot up in disaster areas, then return to normalcy as supply increases.
I'm aware that this assumes a free market, which we don't have in several respects, but it does hold generally true. For example, publishers initially tried to hold the line at high prices for ebooks, but the market has kept things relatively reasonable.
Flash makers are limited by water supply, and most modern memory and logic products are operating as zero sum markets, right now. Growth exists, but it can be sped up to meet demand, not by a long shot. Micron also went all in on AI product production, and Hynix is heavily leaning into it.
The big HDD makers all seem to have some institutional history and wisdom. Tbey are selling like crazy, but not changing any major plans. WD and Seagate are very much acting like this is a bubble (it is), and will pass. They are selling out into the future, but not doing anything that would put them in higher risk if it were to crash next week. Good for their profits and company health, but ad for our wallets.
Unfortunately, I know people on the inside, and the bubble is not gonna pop anytime soon.
1.8T OpenAI IPO (for a company that spends up tto $14,000 for every $200 it gets) 1.1T Anthropic IPO are the figures I've been hearing. For a typical programmer now, the cost is split as follow:
$150,000 salary/etc
$600,000 AI tokens (low figure).
I can tell you for a fact they are right now working on the chips that will be used to power AI FIVE years from now, and already starting to take orders for them, and those chips require even MORE ram/etc. Including memory that apparently doesn't even exist yet (at least at scale).
Yeah, I kind of suspected that this wasn't going to pop anytime soon. It's a wild new technology that's very disruptive and has potential for real use beyond just the hype train. It's akin to the internet though. We'll eventually see the dust settle and AI will be an integral new part of the world but there will be hollowed out slag heaps of AI companies littering the roadway by the end of it all. How's America Online doing these days?